For Users Who Maintain/Develop Sideview XML Views

If you are an old Sideview Utils user from Splunk 7.X or prior, or if you are an administrator of one or more internally-developed Sideview XML views or apps, here’s what you need to know.

Beginning now and going forward, you should install the latest version of the Canary app. If you’re on the latest version of Canary you can remove Sideview Utils entirely.

Sideview has developed and released a new front end to Splunk that runs as a Splunk app called ​“Canary.”

Although the old ​“Sideview Utils” UI relied on Splunk’s ​“Advanced XML” systems, the Canary UI does not.

Although Canary’s main mission is to ensure that Sideview’s own commercial apps continue to run on Splunk 8 in the absence of the ​“Advanced XML” systems, it also happens to be broadly backward-compatible to a decent subset of the views that could be created with Sideview Utils. Whether or not your particular views and dashboards are within this subset is the critical question.

Canary runs in both Splunk 7.X, 8.X and 9.X so you can start using it today.

OK, how do I go about testing? What do I do next?

1. Get the latest version of the Canary app installed (it is available on Splunkbase).
2. You can remove or disable the Sideview Utils app (although you can do this later and the old app will do no harm if you leave it).
3. Navigate in Splunk to the Canary app itself.
4. On its landing page, you’ll see a​big chart analyzing all of your views across all installed apps.
   Note that the categories include ​“Sideview XML migratable” and ​“Sideview XML not migratable,” as well as other categories like ​“Simple XML” and ​“HTML dashboard.”
5. Click on a bar, in an app you’re interested in, that says ​“Sideview XML not migratable.”
6. You should get a detailed list with details about each view in the given app. This will tell you the thing (or things) that Canary doesn’t like in there. It will frequently spell out how to address the problem.
7. Use whichever method you’re most comfortable with to make the suggested changes if there are any, either using the Sideview Editor UI or hand-editing the view XML files in a decent text editor.

What about Sideview Admin Tools?

Sideview Admin Tools is no more. Canary itself has a new copy of the Sideview Editor and some of the other tools that SAT used to have. If there was another tool in Sideview Admin Tools that you missed and that you don’t see in Canary, just let us know!

Custom CSS and Custom JS will likely be a problem

Custom CSS – The Canary UI has a different look and feel, and the pages have a different HTML structure. If you have invested a lot of time and energy in custom CSS, it may take some work to make a given view render nicely again.

Custom JS – this is basically a whole new user interface framework, so if you’ve written a lot of ​“customBehavior” code, it’s not particularly likely that all of your code will still work out of the box. Contact us though, as the work to convert may actually be surprisingly minimal.

Will Canary be free for internal use the way Sideview Utils was?
Yes. It’s available under the same ​“Free Internal Use License Agreement” terms that Sideview Utils had, and with the same ​“internal use” restriction. Similarly, we do also sell reasonably priced commercial licensing for it, for anyone who needs it to be a commercial thing. For that matter, we still sell the ​“Developer Licensing” for anyone who wants to make and distribute their own Splunk app that uses its technology.